Removed my SiteMeter meter from StoryGas...

My 'Gas meter is gone.

After waiting slowly for my blog here to load, hanging on either this...



or "waiting for dg.specificclick.net "

...enough was enough. I've removed the sitemeter code from this site (which drove the counter at the bottom, causing the blog not to load), and already the page loads SO much faster. Hopefully increasing my page views and time spent on the site.




So on Wednesday, after 16604 site visits, and 27868 page views
- feels a shame to remove something that's been here since the beginning.


I put Google analytics onto Storygas much later.
Which means there is a lower count there.
Just so I can keep tabs on the difference, that's currently running at...



...but I would like to have an counter where everyone can see the traffic to this site...


Any suggestions or recommendations for free website counters???

I'd really appreciate any COMMENTS below - THANKS.

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10 Steps For A Facebook Fan Page - from the next web

Via @LucFalempin

Great top 10 list by Ayelet Noff on how to create a fan page on facebook.

The tips are written from the angle of social marketing for brands...

but it's a pretty complete checklist for getting your web series onto facebook... and includes...

1) Open Page – I have often seen the mistake of many companies opening a group or a personal profile for a company. Facebook has created Facebook pages for commercial companies to be able to carry on conversations with their consumers. Pages (unlike personal profiles or groups) enable brands to view insights such as fans demographics, number of interactions with fans, etc.

2) Content is king – Add dynamic content such as screenshots of highlighted areas on your site, videos of explaining your service, stuff that people would be able to look at when they make the decision of joining your fan page or not.

3) Networking – After you’ve uploaded enough interesting content, suggest your page to relevant members in your network.

4) Find your target audience - Finding the people within Facebook that will take an interest in your brand and in your campaigns and make sure they know your page exists.

5) Keep the conversation awake – Create live discussions on your page by both utilizing the status feature and also the discussions app.

6) Excite people about your brand again and again - Create frequent contests and special campaigns for fans to take part in and reward them for their participation with either social or monetary incentives that have to do with your brand.

7) Create a Welcome tab

8 ) Bring Value - Create other tabs that are relevant to your brand.

9) Utilize Facebook’s Insights - How many interactions did you have with fans this week? How many people commented on your posts?

10) Increase your exposure - Promote your Facebook page on your email signature, on your homepage, in other social networks that you’re a part of and in all outgoing materials to bloggers and journalists.

From CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL ARTICLE...


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KateModern on The Money Programme - Media Revolution

Mentioned this almost exactly a year ago here!http://storygas.blogspot.com/2009/03/katemodern-and-me-on-money-programme.html

Here's an extract.

KateModern Mention on TV




From BBC News Money Programme:-

A decade ago, the UK was a net importer of television programmes. Now we're one of the most powerful players on the international television stage, exporting more than half the world's TV "formats".

Consumers are changing the way in which they watch television
But a transformation in the way viewers consume television is turning the industry's business model on its head and threatening the long-term future of this, one of the UK's most significant creative industries.

'Profound' changes
All the UK's major broadcasters have set up websites to allow viewers to watch their programmes via the computer, while social networking sites such as Bebo are carrying television content and even originating their own shows.

As the lines between television, the internet and social networking sites blur, this presents exciting but controversial new opportunities to bring advertising revenue into programmes.

Experts predict a future in which broadcasters gather substantial amounts of information about viewers and sell this data to advertisers who target their messages much more precisely than at present.

CLICK HERE FOR FULL ARTICLE


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Article - Beyond Bebo Originals

bebo originals were pretty much the only show in town for proper 2-way web series commissioning in the UK and Ireland... until it was axed last year.

Was emailed this article which picks up on what might happen next...


From C21Media:-

Restructuring at AOL last year hit its social networking site, Bebo, with staff being lost and its Bebo Originals initiative axed. So what's next for original online youth content?

Bebo pioneered the model for online youth drama with ground-breaking content such as KateModern, Sofia's Diary, The Secret World of Sam King and The Gap Year. The demise of its web production arm, Bebo Originals, in November will make it tougher for indies in this sector to survive, according to Nuno Bernardo (left), the man behind Sofia's Diary.

"It makes what was already hard even harder. Bebo was one of the few outlets that commissioned content," says Bernardo, adding that apart from the BBC and new Virgin Media channel Liv, few other UK portals offer scope for online content commissions.



Zad Rogers, formerly creative director at RDF Digital and founder of Atomized Entertainment... worked with Bebo on series including the site's community review show B-Box... "Bebo Originals was absolutely a catalyst for a whole new way of creating content. What they created in a short period of time, from KateModern (above) to B-Box, was really impressive and it falls to some of the broadcasters to pick up that mantle and start working with brands to commission original content," he says.

FULL ARTICLE HERE:-
http://www.c21media.net/resources/detail.asp?area=79&article=53850


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Beet.TV: Most Online Videos Found Via Blogs, TubeMogul Finds

Thanks again to LG15TODAY.blogspot.com

From Beet.TV:-

At the Personal Democracy Forum, David Burch of TubeMogul told Beet.TV that only some of online videos are found through direct searches. The majority of referrals typically come from blogs.

MORE HERE:-
http://blip.tv/file/2340531



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Rockville CA is a no-show for US (the rest of the world)

Apparently, "Josh Schwartz’s (Gossip Girl, The O.C., Chuck) music-themed web series, “Rockville CA” premieres today on TheWB.com".

Here:-
http://www.rockvilleca.com

I'd love to tell you about how the show features both indie favorites and up-and-coming bands such as Eagles of Death Metal, The Broken West, and Bishop Allen.
Unfortunately, I can't... because this is how the show looks to me.



"The WB can only be viewed in the United States."

Which is fine. But it bills itself as a web series.
But you can't see it on the web (outside the United States).

Wouldn't that make it, not-a-web series?

I could direct you to the post which links to a small piece of software that 'masks' your location as one in the US:
How to view US web shows outside the U.S.

But are you really going to bother doing all that?

Me neither.

If I were to write "HOW TO MAKE A HIT INTERNET SHOW", one of the chapters would be "Make sure your series can be seen everywhere".

If this were the 1930's and you made a radio show that you want to be heard by as many people as possible - isn't this a bit like broadcasting it on a very low powered transmitter? Working against the ubiquity that would increase your audience, which in turn might earn you more money.

What do you think?
See COMMENTS below

The Great Internet Video Lie

Interesting blog post here: (from a tweet @capsulefilms)

From the mark cuban weblog:-

Internet Video. Its the salvation for content creators everywhere. Its the end to dependence on the big bad meanies, the cable and satellite companies. Right ? Hell no. The concept that “over the top” video creates a valid business alternative for content creators is as misguided an internet business myth as there is.

For grins, lets say you want to start a business for which you want to stream, live or on demand, any video. Any quality. You want the ability to reach merely 10k simultaneous viewers. Not a big number. In fact , its a tiny number. Its certainly not competitive with any form of traditional TV, but its a starting point. So to stream 10k simultaneous streams, what are your choices ?

Can you just do it from a PC in your dorm room ? From your house on your cable or DSL line ? No. You will need an outside vendor in order to offer a mere 10k simultaneous streams. Which leads to the question of who can provide a service as simple as 10k streams ? Who can do it with any level of reliability ?

MORE HERE:-
http://blogmaverick.com/2009/01/27/the-great-internet-video-lie/


But isn't it the legacy media’s job/ obsession/ 'reason for being' to try to get as many viewers for a single piece of content at time of release - say one million hits - rather than, say, 400 hundred pieces of content each pulling in 2500 hits.

And that’s before you even consider an editorial ability to build a community around that stream of content, and the ability for the audience to comment, post video responses, make content, to contribute to the stream (eg LG15: the show is yours, lg15today.blogspot.com, or even skulladay.com)

Surely the strength of internet content is that it isn’t a one way transmission?

I think I’m thinking, you don’t necessarily need 10,000 people to view a single piece of content simultaneously in order for something to become huge…?

What do you think?
See COMMENTS below

All smiles as web shows come of age

Great article forwarded to me by Kirill writer, Andrew McCaldon, from last week's Observer.

Excellent overview of the recent history of Online Drama and Comedy by Ajesh Patalay.

From The Observer:-

It started with a girl named Bree. At least that's what she said her name was. She was 16, American and girlishly pretty. In June 2006, under the name LonelyGirl15, she posted her first video online. It lasted a minute and a half, was shot in her bedroom and showed her talking direct to camera. She namedropped a couple of other video bloggers (vloggers) and pulled a few funny faces. 'What you need to know about my town,' she said, 'is that it's really boring. That's probably why I spend so much time on my computer, I'm a dork.' That was it. Typical of the confessional teenage vlogs circulating the web at the time.

A few days later, the next video appeared, showing Bree goofing around with a puppet monkey. In the third, she talked about being home-schooled and imparted some trivia about Antarctica. Pretty mundane stuff. It wasn't until the sixth vlog, entitled My Parents Suck ..., that the tone shifted: in it she complained that her parents had forbidden her from going out with her friend Daniel on account of her 'religion'. It wasn't clear what religion this was. Within hours the video had notched up 50,000 hits. (The previous postings had counted 50,000 to 100,000 hits in the course of a week.) Two days later the tally was up to half a million. Suddenly LonelyGirl15 was a phenomenon. With each new video, as parental tensions heightened and suggestions of the occult crept in, the buzz grew ever greater.

MORE HERE:-
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2008/dec/14/internet-web-series

Ajesh Patalay also lists 10 web shows to watch:
1. Seth MacFarlane's Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy
2. Smart Girls At The Party
3. 50 To Death
4. Easy To Assemble
5. Kirill
6. Sorority Forever
7. The Guild
8. House Poor
9. Blahgirls
10. Sanctuary

It's a great article, but... there's just one TINY fragment of a sentence with which I really can't agree:

"Scoring a web series hit, however, is still no cinch. Even shows whose view count passes 100,000 in the first week (a fair index of success) can find it hard to sustain."

100,000 in the first week = a fair index of success?
That sounds a bit like "sunset media" industry talk.

Surely one of the strengths - opportunities - of the web is the ability to build a following from scratch. To whatever number of hits... over whatever length of time.

Unless I've misunderstood the article, applying a criteria of "TV Overnights" to the 'first week of uploading' feels incredibly bogus. There may be a time for shows to reach the stage of gaining 100,000 hits per week. But to judge the success of a show by numbers "in the first week" feels hugely misleading.

How about the size of the community around a show?
How busy the message boards or forums?
How many unofficial fansites linking to the home site?
How many members or fans signed up on the home site, or bebo, or MySpace, or Facebook?

Surely these are better indicators of the health of a show. The quantum shift for all of us is stepping away from the methodology of measuring TV shows or film "on release", towards tracking communities of fans over time.

We haven't developed ways of measuring, recording and sharing these 'other' indicators. Not to an 'industry standard'. And it doesn't fit the way sponsors or networks currently operate, so I think we'll continue to see sentiments such as
"shows whose view count passes 100,000 in the first week (a fair index of success)"
in the industry for some time to come.

What do you think? On "Comments" below.
.